This install­ment in our ongo­ing series of book reviews takes on Why the Drey­fus Affair Mat­tersby lawyer/novelist Louis Beg­ley. Hugh Murtaugh’s com­pli­men­ta­ry review of Begley’s work inter­twines the Drey­fus and the Guan­tanamo nar­ra­tives. Both Beg­ley and this review­er con­clude with the same lament from Proust: “As for ask­ing one­self about its val­ue, not one thought of it now .… It was no longer shock­ing. That was all that was required.”

By Hugh K. Murtagh

The sto­ry of Guan­tanamo Bay is not over. Pres­i­dent Oba­ma will not be able to shut­ter the island prison until at least 2011, and then only by mov­ing the remain­ing detainees to a state­side facil­i­ty. Time pass­es, details emerge: the “Camp Delta Stan­dard Oper­at­ing Pro­ce­dures” find their way onto the inter­net; a mil­i­tary judge will not allow the pros­e­cu­tion of a ter­ror­ist leader because he has been so bad­ly abused; Sami al-Hajj, the al-Jazeera jour­nal­ist held for years on chang­ing unsub­stan­ti­at­ed charges, is final­ly released to Sudan, with his diaries.

New York Uni­ver­si­ty Jour­nal of Inter­na­tion­al Law and Pol­i­tics (JILP) is a stu­dent-run online pub­li­ca­tion devot­ed to com­men­tary on con­tem­po­rary issues in inter­na­tion­al and com­par­a­tive law. Found­ed in 1968 with the aid of a Ford Foun­da­tion Grant, the New York Uni­ver­si­ty Jour­nal of Inter­na­tion­al Law and Pol­i­tics fea­tures arti­cles on inter­na­tion­al legal top­ics by lead­ing schol­ars and prac­ti­tion­ers, as well as notes, case com­ments, and book anno­ta­tions writ­ten by Jour­nal mem­bers.